If there's one consistent piece of criticism that gets lobbed in Canonical's and Mark Shuttleworth's direction, it's that they do not contribute enough code - or anything else for that matter - to the Free software world. Mark Shuttleworth has apparently had enough, and has written a very, very lengthy blog post detailing how he feels about this criticism.

I didn't say Ubuntu made the codec install easy, I said it's easy in their distro. Other distros just don't have this setup right or they don't have the repos to support the codecs that are being asked for.